Sunday, August 17, 2014

Short Rows and The Principles of Knitting

The new shawl I'm designing has a center panel that I want to come down to a point before adding the border. I think I'm going to try this doing short rows, but a quick swatch test showed me that wrap and turn short rows were going to be painful in lace weight yarn.

So off to my studio for the huge tome, The Principles of Knitting by June Hemmons Hiatt. If you've never seen this 700 page book (I have the revised edition), you really should track it down. Hiatt is the geeky-ist of geeks when it comes to knitting. She has five different techniques for creating short rows, plus variations on those techniques!

You have to get used to some of the language in this book. When she wrote it in 1988, knitting wan't as big as it is today. She uses some non-standard terms compared to those in popular use today. (For instance, she uses "inside" and "outside" instead of "right side" and "wrong side.") However, this book has just about everything you ever wanted to know about anything having to do with knitting-- and many ways to do it!